Why We Sell For Less

DandyDomains.com uses a unique acquisition strategy that allows us to retail premium domains at exceptionally low costs.

There is a popular misconception that investing in domain names is an easy-money lifestyle that requires little to no skill.  This fantasy could not be further from the truth.  With tens of thousands of domain investors, or domainers, competing for the limited supply of names that become available daily, naive investors quicky find themselves swept away into debt-land like minnows in an ocean.  In fact, the vast majority of domainers quit within six months after their debut, slogging out the door with a financial hit in the 4-5 figures and a portfolio filled with snake oil.

The key to becoming a successful domain investor is to plan acquisitions with exceptional care and forethought.  To most erudite domainers, planning means examining a sizeable collection of prospective domains to acquire, one by one, and selecting ones that appear particularly memorable and brandable — ExceptionalSofas.com, for example.  This screening process is manual and tedious, however, and once finished, even these industrious investors manage to resell less than 1% of their portfolio contents annually.  Hence, despite their rigor, these domainers engage in a career that falls just a shallow step above speculation.  Observing that the domain ExceptionalSofas.com is taken, most furniture companies would rather turn to available alternatives, perhaps FabulousSofas.com or AmazingSofas.com, than pay off the ExceptionalSofas.com owner.  As their sales trickle so slowly and sporadically from their web identity vaults, domainers must sell each name at over 100 times its acquisition cost just to break even, and that doesn't even cover annual domain renewal fees!  "Fluke" sales, such as that of Spago.com for $11,500 on the day of this writing, do occur, and bring wealth to a lucky few of these shot-in-the-dark investors.

DandyDomains.com's investment paradigm is different.  We use a proprietary set of technologies which automatically pinpoints highly liquid domains, selecting only names that fall under at least one of the following categories:

• Generic Products & Services: Domains such as CompanyShirts.com, WaterRafts.net, and SocialEntrepreneurship.org.  These web identities represent offerings whose values are deeply ingrained in popular consciousness, are often readily measurable, and for which there exists no satisfactory substitute.  We also consider how appropriately each keyword fits its extension.

• Geographically Targeted Names: Domains such as IllinoisMotels.com, OrlandoFlorists.net, and Staton.org.  GEO-domains are becoming increasingly important for small businesses serving specific regions as the surging popularity of Google Local Search and other such services is galvanizing business owners to replace Yellow Page listings with digital presences.  We also slot highly generic personal name domains (e.g. MattMiller.com) under this category.

• Non-Speculative Brandables: Domains such as HeatingSolutions.com, RedTop.net, and EasySearch.org.  Taking caution not to infringe on any registered trademarks, we acquire brandable domains which are broad in meaning and serve as the verbal root, or verbal inspiration, for the names of many existing companies across several niches, with no single dominant player sporting that brand.  We afford these existing companies the opportunity to capture that brand root and become the first result which appears when users search that brand root in Google or Yahoo.

As a result of our acquisition techniques, which combine automated filtering with a human touch, we consistently turn over an astonishing 20-25% of our domain inventory to end-users each year! Thus, DandyDomains.com can flip domains at mere single-digit multiples of our purchase prices yet maintain a profit, allowing our domain names to end up where they belong: in the hands of passionate founders, entrepreneurs, and business owners.